Conference calls are an integral part of personal, corporate and government communication. As used herein, a conference call is defined as a telephone call in which multiple parties participate, each party having the ability to both listen and speak, in the voice, audio, text, video and/or graphics portion of the call. The telephone call may be a traditional land based wired telephone, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone or a mobile or cell phone. Some conference calls are uni-directional, such as a corporate announcement or a news conference where audio and sometimes text, video and/or graphics are delivered from one point to many, in just one direction.
Conference calls have the potential to touch a plurality of communication systems including a traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN), the Internet and wireless platforms. In addition, providing a conference call service requires the ability to interface with a plurality of Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) with high quality, high reliability and low latency (time delay).
A CPE may be a tabletop telephony device found in many conference rooms and offices, but is in no way limited to that configuration. As used herein, a teleconference-enabled CPE is defined as a device that allows users to participate in a multi-party teleconference call. Examples of CPE are traditional wired telephones, Internet (VoIP) telephony devices, wireless devices such as Smartphones/PDAs, and dashtop/automotive devices that communicate with public/private networks, cell or mobile phone networks, satellite networks or other networks.
The functionality necessary to conduct a conference call may be located remotely on a network coupled to a CPE or within a CPE locally. For example, the functionality may reside with a teleconference service provider organization whose business is providing conference call services. Services provided by such organizations vary in calling features, level of customer service support and price. Typical services offered by a conference call service provider may include: enter and announce (all new participants to a conference call are announced to all parties attending), call recording (call is recorded for historical purposes, transcription or playback at a later time), secured calling (no one can enter the call without permission of the host, mainly for security/confidentiality reasons), and listen only, just to name a few.
Teleconference service providers usually offer full-duplex capability, whereby all participants in a conference call can both transmit to and receive from all other participants simultaneously. In the context of a regular telephone call, full-duplex capability may be thought of as a two-lane road from source to destination where signals can be sent in both directions simultaneously. A teleconference service provider typically uses a conference bridge to facilitate its calling service by providing two main functions: 1) enabling a plurality of CPE devices (which may operate with a variety of technologies) to connect to the bridge, and 2) enabling simultaneous full-duplex capability between all participants.
A feature almost universally found in teleconference telephony systems is the mute function. When the mute function status is “activated,” it stops or prevents audio signals from a particular microphone (or microphones) of a CPE from contributing audio to the conference call. Effectively, the functionality a microphone is temporarily disabled. Typically, that is done to minimize contributing background noise to the call or when a discussion within a group is desired without disrupting others or having others listen in. Frequently, users forget to change the mute function status to “deactivated” as they attempt to rejoin a conference call, only to realize that they are muted when no one responds to their dialogue. That is not a desirable user experience: it can be embarrassing, can waste the time of the teleconference call participants and can disrupt the flow of an entire discussion.
It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods for automatic mute detection for use during a teleconference call. To the inventors' knowledge, no such system or method currently exists.